Effects of positive and negative stimuli on vocabulary learning in children

Human Learning

Experimental subjects were assigned to one each of three experimental treatments, labeled T1, T2, and T3. T1 represented the control group. T2 and T3 received the positive and negative treatments and test afterwards.

The subject pool consisted of ninety grade school students approximately nine years old. This sample size was determined to offer the best compromise between economy and measurement parameters given the purpose of the study and the discriminatory power of the statistical procedure to which the data were subjected.

A larger sample size would not have added power to the treatments' ability to create observable variance and would have represented an incremental increase in cost. To simply demonstrate the difference of effect across treatment variables, sub-sample size of thirty was ample.

There were some reservations about using subjects in this age range. Prior studies have shown that children under the age of four are much more susceptible to the kind of stumuli used in this study, but are often very different developmentally. Across children four years old, vocabulary and spelling skills suffer much wider variance even when they hail from a common class than do the same skills across children of nine or ten years age. Most four-year-olds should be able to spell simple words like Mama, Daddy, cat, and so forth, but a significant fraction will be unable to do so, and a significant fraction will be much more advanced and able to spell the names of the days of the week (for instance). Such broad differences in skill levels will be found in significantly smaller fractions of the population of nine-year-olds.

Another cause of concern with four-year-olds is that they are so impressionable that an argument could be made that those assigned to the sample which received the negative stimulus could be harmed psychologically. While there is no guarantee that a subject of nine years age will go unharmed psychologically by the negative stimulus, most research has shown that most of what shapes human personality takes place by the age of seven. This being the case, the four-year-olds are much more likely to be haunted by the negative stimulus throughout their lives than are the nine-year-olds.

Subjects were semi-randomly assigned to each treatment group. Overall, random assignment was the rule except when demographics showed an inequitable distribution of subjects.

Materials

Materials consisted of the supplies necessary to subject the subjects to the treatments. For all treatment groups this consisted of the chalk or other implements necessary to write the vocabulary lesson on the board and the materials used by the subjects to record their responses to the test (pencil and a score card). Groups T2 and T3 additionally required the puzzles described in detail below.

The puzzles took several forms based on whether they were distributed to the group which received the positive stimulus or negative stimulus.

The puzzle distributed to T2 (positive stimulus) was a100 piece puzzle with a simple geometric design intended to facilitate ease of completion.

The puzzle distributed to T3 (negative stimulus) was a 100 piece puzzle of Van Gogh's "Starry Night." It was remarkable in that it was hopelessly impossible to complete as some of the pieces had been replaced with pieces from another puzzle with the same image but different shapes. In other words, each puzzle had pieces in it with the image of the moon from "Starry Night" but the pieces needed to complete the moon did not fit into the puzzle as a whole. Each puzzle had nine pieces substituted in this way.

Technically, the vocabulary words themselves represent an important material in the experiment and they are listed below. Fifteen vocabulary words were chosen which would probably be unfamiliar to nine-year-olds.

Expedient Serendipity Inculcate Explicate Inveterate

Hebetude Pulchritude Nimiety Tremulous Hysteresis

Pilgarlic Susurration Aretaics Bellicose Jocund

RESULTS

Analysis of variance was performed on all groups to measure whether the mean differences in scores were statistically significant. The results showed that positive feedback positively effected subjects' test scores relative to the control group and negative feedback negatively affected subjects' scores relative to the control group. However, the scale of the effect differed according to treatment; negative feedback had a more powerful influence on test scores than did positive feedback.

DISCUSSION

The discrepancy between the power of positive verses negative feedback to influence subjects' test scores warrants discussion. There is a stream of literature that has addressed the weights raters assign negative information verses positive information. It has shown that negative information is usually weighted more heavily than positive information, regardless of the context. More specifically, if an opinion leader conveys negative information about a product to someone, say a co-worker, almost no amount of praise from other opinion leaders regarding the same product can efface the damage done by the one negative comment. Sequence effects have been shown to be largely irrelevant, so whether the negative information comes before or after the praise has no bearing on how difficult it is to overcome the negative information's influence.

An argument could be made that something similar is going on here; there is just something about negativity that has a more powerful psychological influence on the receiver than positivity.

In any event, that positive feedback encourages learning and negative feedback discourages it has profound implications not only for pedagogy in general but for explaining (and potentially remedying) the apparent disparity between minority groups' test scores and the majority group's test scores. Whether a child's self-esteem is damaged by a parent, a teacher, or by society in general, the effect on his or her success in school and in life beyond academics depends, in a measurable way, on the extent of the damage.